The Daughters of Durand-Ruel

In August 1882 Renoir completed a series of portraits of the five Durand-Ruel children at the request of their father Paul Durand-Ruel, a forward-thinking Parisian art dealer who, early on, championed and supported the Impressionists. In this charming double portrait Marie-Thérèse, age fourteen, and her younger sister Jeanne posed for Renoir in the garden of their summer cottage in Dieppe, France, where the family was on holiday. Painted entirely out-of-doors, the portrait retains the vibrant palette and vigorous open brushwork of Renoir's "pure" Impressionist paintings of the later 1870s.